The Biomedical Model of Health

Health Affairs 13 (3): 7-27. 1994. Web 7 Feb 2012. Shi Leiyu, SinghDouglas A. “Essentials of the United States health care system” March 5, 2009 Stephen Jonas, Raymond G, Karen G, “An Introduction to the US healthcare System” 6th Edition, Page 118, 25 May 2007 U.S Healthcare costs, Web 7 Feb, 2012 http://www.kaiseredu.org/Issue-Modules/US-Health-Care-Costs/Background-Brief.aspx Ventres W. “Answers to US health care issues from other countries” Fam Med.

Medical discoveries in the eighteenth century led to fundamental changes in the education of medicine. Physiologists such as Albrecht von Haller who discovered irritability allowed profe... ... middle of paper ... ...eenth century. Colleges across Europe changed their curriculums allowing specialist learning in not just classical theory but the ancillary arts allowing a larger scope of knowledge and ideas to flourish. Hospitals sprang up across England allowing the development of specialist departments and bedside care giving more time to observation and human care. The intellectual movement of enlightenment allowed medical science to progress but a massive factor in the changes in medical education was the political upheaval of the time.

Public Health Leadership Society (2002). Principles of the Ethical Practice of Public Health. Retrieved on March 2, 2011 from http://www.apha.org/NR/rdonlyres/1CED3CEA-287E-4185-9CBD-BD405FC60856/0/ethicsbrochure.pdf Schneider, M. (2011). Introduction to Public Health (3rd Ed). Ontario: Jones and Bartlett Publishers Usohs.gov (2010).

The theories of Hippocrates and Galen are of vital importance to the development of medicine, as they shaped medicine for many centuries to come. Hippocrates was the first to dismiss the notion that magic, spirits, or the Gods could cause or cure disease, reforming the course medicine took. Galen followed in the footsteps of Hippocrates, working relentlessly on human anatomy, endeavoring to fathom how the body functions and what happens when something goes wrong. Without Hippocrates’ belief in diseases being a product of nature revolutionizing medicine, and Galen’s extensive work on the anatomy of the human body, medicine may not have progressed to what it is today. Hippocrates of Cos was an Ancient Greek physician who is thought to be one of the most revolutionary figures in the history of medicine.

By gathering texts and conquering lands, Western European scholars’ pieced together knowledge about hospitals, staving off disease, and how science should be conducted through observation not superstition ushering a new age in the progression of the practice of medicine. Surgical techniques in medieval Europe most often consisted of the amputation of limbs and bloodletting as a means of curing disease. These simple yet dangerous techniques had unpredictable outcomes. Infection was the biggest problem for surgeons so to get around this they used cauterization of the wounds. Avicenna promoted this in his canon of medicine, which set precedence in Weste... ... middle of paper ... ...scholarly sources to educate themselves and began to unearth new ways to treat disease.

[Article]. Social Work, 54(4), 307. Single-payer national health insurance. (2009) Retrieved July 19, 2010, from http://www.pnhp.org/print/facts/single-payer-resources Summary of new health reform law. (2010): The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

The term biomedicine is used to describe scientific medicine which is prominent in Western societies. To get a better grasp of this concept, Baronov (2008) presented the following interrelated views which account for biomedicine’s ongoing development. Fi... ... middle of paper ... ...medical knowledge Health, illness, and the social body: a critical sociology (4th ed., pp. 195-223). Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.

Current US policy and government regulations, like the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, have allowed for CAM to become an integrative part of modernity. This paper examines how the defining of CAM has influenced past and present societal reforms and how the lack of a singular, all encompassing definition was once problematic in CAM’s ability to converge with traditional western medicine. However, due to the growing appeal of CAM’s treatment methods, economic and political factors have paved a path a successful integration into modern medicine. Unorthodox systems of medicine were first developed in Europe and the United states in the late 1700s but were not completely adopted by doctors until the 1800s. Traditional, or orthodox medicine was established in the West through a process of “regulation, association, institution building and systematized medical education” (Coulter & Willis 2004) and any form of deviance threatened that.

The idea soon influenced medicine, the idea of strengthening the healthy cells and isolating them from the unhealthy ones. The simple idea Darwin discovered had changed medicine as a whole. Today, doctors and scientists are able to manipulate genes in order to create new treatments and cures. Today, Darwin’s discovery changed and saved millions of lives around the world. Despite the fact that genetic engineering can have a negative impact on society, it was an important discovery due to the advancement in conventional medicine.

PhiSci Archive, University of Pittsburg. Accessed 2/19/2012 http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/4208/ Thompson, A.K., Faith, K., Gibson, J.L. & Upshur, R. (2006). Pandemic influenza preparedness: an ethical framework to guide decision-making. BioMed Central.